Day one for the Missouri S&T Solar Car Team ended in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store on the outskirts of Vanita, Okla., about 70 miles short of Neosho, Mo. The team was beset by technical problems -- blown fuses, issues with the fairings -- that limited Solar Miner VI's speed to 40-45 mph.
"Tonight's going to be a real engineering night," says Lance Feyh, who is traveling with the team to post updates and interviews on this site.
Meanwhile, the University of Michigan reports making it to Neosho at around 5:40 p.m. CDT. The Michigan team's blogger reports that Principia College -- seeded eighth in the race -- was the second team to make it to Neosho's Crowder College, the site of Monday's daylong event. The S&T team expects to arrive in good order Monday morning.
Stay tuned for more posts here, or check out the North American Solar Challenge site for the official scoop as it becomes available.
FriendFeed site
Another resource for the latest news from all the teams is this FriendFeed site, which aggregates all the solar car blog posts from all the teams.
Thanks for the update Andy. Wheel fairings have always been an issue. Its about time we adopted a wheel fairing fairy. And where's Jack Jakkidi when we are having wheel fairing issues. He made us about 6 sets of those for the 2003 race (5 sets of those not working is completely a different conversation).
Hey, what can I say? Practice makes perfect. And if you'll remember, the 6th set actually made it the entire race without failing :-)